As a male, I get a lot of weird looks when I say I shoot intimate portraits of women. The looks are immediately followed by a bunch of questions like:
- “How does your wife feel about you doing this?”
- “Aren’t you religious?”
- “Are you worried what you’re portraying to your daughter?”
My favorite question to answer is “Why boudoir?”… The answer is really simple. I love helping people feel more confident and celebrate whatever stage of life they’re in. 24 years old or 64 years old, size 2 or size 24, healthy or fighting an illness. It doesn’t matter, we’re all beautiful.. just the way we are, and we need to own it! I know it sounds cliché, but it’s so true. The one thing that gets lost in today’s society is the value of confidence. I’ve seen confident people accomplish amazing things all because they just believed they could. I just want to spread that to as many ladies as I can.
My Past Interactions With Confidence
Confidence was the one thing I lacked most of my life. Growing up in a family full of model-esc people with middle class wealth, I often felt like the black sheep. I was riddled with acne, a 100-lbs of extra weight, and gaps in my teeth so big I can drive cars through them. On top of that, losing my father and a number of friends / family members, the depression was overwhelming at times. Honestly, I was silently suffering in that fog until I started dating my wife. By our wedding day, I was emotionally much better, but still felt VERY self-conscious about the pictures we were inevitably going to take. Knowing this, my photographer was intent on proving me wrong about myself. The very first picture he took of me changed my life and he knew it when he showed me the back of his camera. In that picture I was strong, I was handsome, I was me.. By the end of the day, I knew I had just found how I was going to change the world.
So Why Boudoir?
So after photographing hundreds of weddings, I was asked to do a boudoir session for a bride as a gift for her future husband. At the end of the session, we reviewed the pictures and the tears just started flowing down her face. She stated over and over again, how much she’s never felt so beautiful. She started telling me how long it’s been since she felt beautiful. Being a mother of 3 and 45 lbs heavier since the last time she wore lingerie, she walked into this session nervous that the pictures would show the “troll” she felt like. Taking the pictures and then viewing them reminded her just how beautiful she was and how to express it. Three weeks later, she got married a different woman.
Since that wonderful moment, I’ve been blessed to meet and photograph countless women going through some change in life, all of whom benefited greatly from the session. I will forever be grateful for the photographer that changed my life and I can only hope to provide that same experience to as many women as possible.
